Atwood Wins Booker Prize

Feminist author Margaret Atwood, 60, best known for her novel The Handmaid’s Tale, received Britain’s top prize for fiction writing—the Booker Prize. Atwood had been nominated three times before, but won this year with her tenth novel, The Blind Assassin. The Handmaid’s Tale envisions a future in which right wing extremists seize control of the country and impose draconian, misogynistic laws on women. Published in 1985, it eerily predicts a regime that is in many ways similar to the Taliban in Afghanistan.